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Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President's Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior adviser at the Rock Creek Group.

And multinationals do not relocate only in industrial as well as financial support for not paying taxes.
Apple pays lower taxes in Ireland, Burger King, Starbucks and McDonald's avoid paying taxes through Swiss operations.

That the competitiveness is sliding is out in the open with the slide of U.S. position to the 5th in the last Global Competitiveness Report. One of the striking features in this report is the link of public debt with competitiveness. Those nations with high public debt and with rising risks in the sovereign debt default area, the public spending on R&D and Technology innovation in those have dwindled; U.S. is no exception given this trend. U.S. multinationals is part of this challenge, but where they score more is in their ability to leverage financial capital to build efficiency walls that are less pregnable than the rest. Labor market efficiency and technology readiness is a laudable element, so the good things should not be ignored.

Migration of jobs, that cannot be sustained by efficient deployment of capital and labor, is a given in the globalized world (of capital and labor), there is no need to single out U.S. Multinationals for that denouement.

It's not fair to begin this discussion at 1999. I suspect that this point is misleading:

"From 1999 to 2009, US multinationals in manufacturing cut their US employment by 2.1 million, or 23.5%, but increased employment in their foreign subsidiaries by only 230,000 (5.3%) – not nearly enough to explain the much larger decline in their US employment."

I don't have the figures at the ready, but I suspect that that figure would be much more dramatic over a period beginning in the mid-20th century. After all, globalization and "Made in China" were already thriving by 1999.

I do not disagree with the central thesis of this argument. But I see no problem in admitting that multinationals are in fact abandoning America, and have been for a long time. While Americans may see that as a threat to their future, many in other parts of the world see it as a reason for hope and opportunity.